The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

Next order of business -- marketing department: yes or no?

Last weekend, I saw an old friend.

I hadn't seen Dangy for almost a decade. I got to meet her fiance (Jeff) and saw their house in Tucson. We went out to dinner and had great conversation for several hours. They both teach computer certification classes, so we had lots of stuff to talk about. The wedding is in a few months -- I think they'll enjoy married life.

I'm embarrassed that it took me 7 months to finally get up into Tucson to see them -- I hope to see more of them for the remainder of my time here.

This past week at work I led a working group for web portals and business intelligence technology, and how it applies to the Army (specifically to my organization). It was surprisingly interesting stuff. We had guests in from all over the country from other CECOM / SEC organizations who came and talked about this stuff.

It was good for others in my organization to hear people besides me to talk about this stuff. It sounds like there's some pretty interesting work ahead. It may not be parallel / distributed high performance computing, but it is good stuff nonetheless.

In doing a little perl work for my dad this past week, I found a minor bug in the CPAN module Mail::Message::Body::Multipart. It didn't do case-insensitive parsing of MIME stuff properly. For example, multipart messages sent from pine wouldn't parse properly -- some methods in the module would detect that it was multipart, but you couldn't retrieve the separate parts.

I submitted a suggested patch to the author, and he sent me back a better one. Coolness.

Just doing my part to make a better world.

The OSCAR group had a 2-day meeting at Ericsson in Canada last week, followed by most everyone attending the Ottawa Linux Symposium. It looks like a good time was had by all, and lots of interesting things were discussed. For example, collaboration with Mandrake was one of the topics. Given my bias for Mandrake (it's been my distro of choice for years), this could be a Good Thing. :-)

Wish I could have been there!

It still amuses me that I'm the chair of the OSCAR group and I haven't been able to attend a single OSCAR event during my tenure. :-)

Tonight, I had dinner at Liza and Robert's. Good food and conversation. They have a house a bit south of town on several acres land with lots of trees. It has a fabulous view of the mountains. We talked about all kinds of things, including, of course computer geek stuff (both Liza and Robert work in IT fields).

We sat on their back porch and actually watched a small thunderstorm. It was great -- although I was in a small rain shower earlier this week, I haven't seen real rain since I've gotten down here. The thunder literally rolls down the mountains here, so you can hear it multiple times as it changes aspect (e.g., left to right, across the mountains).

Apparently, this area of Arizona has a heavy monsoon season every year, traditionally starting right around the 4th of July. Hence, the name "Mt. Huachuca" (thunder mountain). I always wondered about how it got that name -- it seemed fairly strange for mountains in the middle of the desert. Now that I know about the monsoon season, it makes sense. :-)

The rains can get pretty severe, which can lead to a lot of flooding because the ground is so solid that the water does not soak in.